


Breaking Barriers

by Higuchimon



Series: Gifts of Power [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Character Diversity Boot Camp, Dice Gods Challenge, Diversity Writing Challenge, Gen, Word Count Set Boot Camp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-11-29 07:02:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11435637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Higuchimon/pseuds/Higuchimon
Summary: There was a very good reason why Seto didn't help with a mind-controlled Kisara attacking the city.  It's a little hard to do so when you're not actually in the same world.





	1. Chapter 1

**Series Title:** Gifts of Power|| **Title:** Breaking Barriers  
 **Characters:** Mokuba, Seto, Noah|| **Pairing:** N/A  
 **Chapter Word Count:** 2,646|| **Story Word Count:** 2,646|| **Chapter Count:** 1/3  
 **Genre:** Family|| **Rated:** G  
 **Challenge:** Diversity Writing, H5, three-shot; Dice Gods Challenge: Mokuba; Word Count Set Boot Camp, #6, 8,000; Character Diversity Boot Camp, #26, sent  
 **Notes:** This takes place in the same world as **Dragonsight** and details what Seto and Mokuba were doing before, during, and after Kisara's unwanted attack on the city.  
 **Summary:** There was a very good reason why Seto didn't help with a mind-controlled Kisara attacking the city. It's a little hard to do so when you're not actually in the same world.

* * *

Mokuba didn’t always like being ignored. Most people paid far more attention to his brother than they did to him, finding a dragon tamer, the world’s finest duelist – Mokuba did not actually care who the official ‘King of Games’ was, he knew his brother’s skills – and one of the richest people in the entire world to be more interesting than his little brother. 

Sometimes that annoyed him. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have his own skills and powers. 

Right now, he thoroughly enjoyed being ignored, because he got a front row seat to his brother verbally shredding an idiot who thought he could pull off the little scheme he’d put together. 

_Honestly, what kind of an idiot walks into big brother’s office and just **tells him** to hand over all of his dragon records, like they’re some kind of a burden to him?_

Mokuba wished he had popcorn right now. But he’d been busy doing some small practicing with his own skills and that required a laptop more than it did a snack. His fingers continued to fly over the keyboard while he paid just enough attention to the man standing in front of his brother to get what information he needed. 

_Let’s see…_ His mind reached out to touch the international web. _Noah? Are you there?_

That was a ridiculous question. Noah was _always_ there, because Noah had nowhere else to be. His attention might not necessarily be on what Mokuba wanted to know, but he would be there. 

And he always kept an eye out for Mokuba’s calls anyway. Part o that made Mokuba a trifle nervous: they didn’t have the best history, after all. But today it could be useful. 

**Yes?**

Noah appeared in Mokuba’s mind in the flawless image of who he’d once been: heir to the Kaiba corporation and a young genius with the same gift Mokuba himself had: technopathy. Noah had it on an entirely different level now that he lived in the data world. 

_We’ve got a small issue,_ Mokuba said, quite glad that thought and data moved at such speeds. Seto would keep the idiot talking while he and Noah worked out what was going on and figured out how to put a stop to it. 

**Do tell.**

In quick bursts Mokuba passed what they knew on: that this dimwit strolled up through the security features with a couple of small dragons at his heels – already offending Seto since he’d done so without asking so much as a breath of permission to bring strange dragons into his territory – and casually demanding that Seto turn over his dragon records. 

It took Noah a few minutes to stop laughing. Once he did, he had a single question. 

**Does brother intend to throw him out a window?**

Technically Noah wasn’t their brother. They didn’t share any blood with one another. But they’d been adopted by his father after Noah’s not-death and _legally_ they were related. 

Mokuba sort of suspected that a lack of siblings in his original life was what kept Noah calling them that now. He’d never asked. Some things he didn’t want confirmed. 

_I think he wants to._ That was only a tiny fib. Mokuba knew his big brother very well and from the moment the interloper crossed into Domino City without clearing his dragons, and without being a proper dragon tamer, let alone trying to demand all the records of Seto’s dragons, he’d all but signed his own death warrant. 

Not to mention that just being around him made Mokuba’s hackles rise. He wasn’t a dragon himself, but you couldn’t hang around them as much as he and his brother did and not pick up on a few things. Something was really off about this guy and Mokuba wanted him out of the city before anything actually happened. 

He tilted his head, bringing his attention back to the somewhat conversation going on between the stranger and his brother. 

“They’re nothing but dumb beasts, Kaiba-san, as I’m certain any dragon tamer would agree. Why else would they need to be _tamed_ in the first place?” The stranger smiled a smile that he’d surely practiced a thousand times. Mokuba wanted to wipe it off of his face, and maybe wipe his mouth off his face while he was at it. “Someone with your skills and talents shouldn’t waste his time with brutes like that. I can take them off of your hands.” 

“You’ve said the same thing four different ways already and my answer is the same as it was then: no.” Seto tapped one finger on his desk in a particular coded pattern. Mokuba knew what that meant: get security. 

That took a grand total of three seconds, since he just had to send a silent text over to that department. Someone would be on the way within a minute: one rule of KaibaCorp was that there were _always_ two security members ready to go up to the boss’s office, no matter what. They didn’t get assigned to anything else when that was their role on the roster. 

Not that Seto or Mokuba especially needed the help to defend themselves. Seto had an army of dragons who would gladly eat anyone who annoyed him too much, and if he were feeling in the mood, he could always use a certain tool of his that Mokuba knew he didn’t especially like, but knew how to use. As for Mokuba himself… a technopath of his level had a lot more uses for the internet than just generic porn. 

He glanced back to see the results of Noah’s quick search for information on their intruder. There wasn’t much interesting there; he’d come from a perfectly ordinary town, didn’t have any real powers of his own, but an apparent knack for discovering enchanted items. Mokuba thought that should probably count as an actual power, or at least a useful ability. He could’ve made a decent living off that alone. 

Then something else caught his eye: the stranger had made a recent trip out of the country, and come back with a couple of items that he insisted were magical, even if no one else could detect anything in them. 

The images of what he’d brought flashed up on the screen with little more than a thought turned that way. Mokuba stared at them, a slow scrape of fear creeping its way up his spine. 

**I don’t like it either. Those are old magic. Almost as old as the Millennium Items.**

Mokuba wasn’t going to disagree with Noah. He didn’t know where the magic came from, but from the designs on those images, he could tell they were related to dragons somehow. 

There hadn’t always been dragon tamers. Most histories pinpointed their development to somewhere in the last couple of centuries, as dragons began to be more integrated into human society. No one knew where dragons even came from, only that there were on occasion people born in the world who could become dragons. It didn’t come from one’s parents and it didn't always get passed down to one’s children. 

There were also dragons who couldn’t become human but there weren’t many dragons who weren’t at least as intelligent as humans, whether or not they could speak in human tongues. 

Part of Seto’s duties as a dragon tamer was to _learn_ about dragons, to figure out a way for dragons to live peacefully with others. Sometimes this required knocking heads together. Seto was good at that part of his job. 

Part of those duties also included protecting dragons from anyone who wanted to hurt them that the dragons couldn’t somehow manage for themselves. Seto was _extremely_ good at that part of his job. 

In the few seconds it took for all of that to warp through Mokuba’s mind, he could see the stranger getting angrier and angrier. 

“If you won’t give me what I want, then I’ll just take it myself!” 

Mokuba was already on his feet and Seto as well, reaching for something under his desk: the Millennium Rod. Mokuba knew that he didn’t use it except in extreme emergencies, but anything that he considered a threat to KaibaCorp qualified. 

If the stranger had intended violence on either Seto or Mokuba, then there would’ve been no contest at all. Seto would’ve had the Rod out on time to stop him and much of what happened afterward wouldn’t have. 

Only the stranger moved fast, faster than either of them judged, and a small blue sphere crashed down at his feet, filling the room with a thick, foul smoke that filled their throats and blinded their eyes, and Mokuba couldn’t stop coughing. Nor could Seto; Mokuba could hear him clearly, even through his own coughing. 

There were other noises, such as feet moving around and something being thrown here and there, and then Mokuba couldn't keep himself on his feet anymore. 

The last thing he found himself fully aware of was Noah’s voice in the back of his mind shouting something he couldn’t understand, and then a horrible pain racked through him, and he couldn’t see or hear anything at all. 

* * *

“Mokuba. Mokuba!” 

It drifted into his mind that Mokuba was him and therefore someone was calling to him. He thought he blinked. He didn’t know for certain. He did know that he tried to wake up and he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. 

He groaned somewhere in there. Now he could feel hands on his shoulders, shaking him, and he tried to blink again. This time he did it, and when his eyes opened, he could see a little. 

Not much. There weren’t any lights on. That wasn’t right. The KaibaCorp building was designed so that even in a power outage, they had backup generators ready to kick in. There should’ve been something that would give light. 

Only there wasn’t. At least not the lights that he expected. As his senses slowly put themselves back together, he realized that what he now saw by were candles, dozens of them set all over. 

His big brother prepared for _everything_. 

And now Seto sat near him, staring at him, far more worry than anyone else would see in those blue eyes of his. 

“Mokuba?” There was quiet concern in his voice. Mokuba pushed himself up a little, his head spinning a bit still. 

“I’m all right,” he tried to reassure Seto. He didn’t think that was absolutely true, but the less his brother had to worry about, the sooner they could get this sorted out. “What happened?” 

“It was that idiot. I never did get his name.” Seto snarled the words out, his anger focused on that fool most of all. “I don’t know what that gas of his did other than knock us out, but he ransacked the place looking for my dragon records.” 

Mokuba sat up a little more, wincing. He needed something to drink; his throat cracked and parched. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Seto set a bottled water in front of him. He drank it down while hearing the rest of what happened. 

“He didn’t find them.” Seto flashed a smile that most of his dragon friends would’ve been very proud of. 

Mokuba wasn't surprised. He knew all along where Seto’s records were kept and the stranger hadn’t had a chance of finding them. 

He looked around again. This was far too dark for afternoon. He glanced back at Seto, whose thought processes seemed to have followed his own. 

“That was a few hours ago. It’s almost midnight.” Seto’s eyes flashed with rage. “He did something to the power system and a few other things before he left, and I can’t figure out how to undo them yet. I don’t think it’s technopathic in nature, but I can’t get any of the lights on or the doors to open. I can’t even get in touch with security.” 

Mokuba jerked his head around to where he’d been sitting. His laptop wasn’t where it had been, but he quickly caught sight of it: knocked onto the floor, battered and broken. He could get it repaired or replaced within a day, since it was KaibaCorp issue, but until he did that, or until he could connect to another system or they could get the building systems going again, he didn’t have a connection to anything. 

That sent a strong chill of its own all through him. He hadn’t been disconnected for the last three years. Even if he wasn’t using the internet or the systems for anything at all – and he kind of always low-level monitored everything in KaibaCorp for any sort of problems – it was a part of him. This was almost like losing an arm or a leg. 

_I’ll get it back, though._ This was worse than if the power had been knocked out in a storm. Not only did they have the back-ups if _that_ happened, but in that case, he could’ve hooked himself easily into something else to help with repairs. 

Now he just had to wait. Kaibas, by blood or by adoption, weren’t very good at waiting. 

Seto stood up. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with any of my dragons, but nothing works. It’s like I can’t reach beyond the building itself.” 

Mokuba considered that carefully. “Doesn't sound like anything I know of.” He hated not being able to find the instant information on what the situation _was_. How was he going to help his brother like this? 

Seto stared at the black space that had replaced the windows. Normally they had a magnificent view of Domino City. Now Mokuba couldn’t even see the stars, let alone any of the city lights. 

That wasn’t right at all. Even with the power out, they should’ve been able to see the stars. 

He steadied himself on his feet, taking his time to get more assured of his balance before he headed over to the window. They did have bullet-proof glass there, and shields that could come down in case of certain other threats, but they didn’t look like _this_. 

Like a curtain of nothingness hanging just beyond his touch. 

He shuddered at the thought, turning as Seto came up behind him, staring at the emptiness outside as if personally offended by it. 

He probably was. Nothing that could get the jump on him like this _wouldn’t_ offend him. 

“What about the phone lines?” They needed to try anything and everything they could to get through all of this. The idea of asking for help wasn’t one that came naturally to either of them but sometimes allowances had to be made. 

Seto shook his head. “I tried already. They’re not working.” 

Something about all of that started to click into place into Mokuba’s head. He stared back at the windows, trying to work it all into a pattern that made sense. 

“So we don’t have power, we can’t communicate with the outside, and it almost looks like we’re not even in Domino City anymore,” Mokuba said, each tiny piece fitting into place. 

Seto nodded, sharp eyes focused on his brother. Mokuba warmed at the thought that even without his usual connections, Seto counted on him to be useful, to help. 

“I think he might’ve done some kind of space twisting.” Mokuba started to gesture towards the remains of his laptop. “Noah and I saw a little about him before that. He had two items he dug up from somewhere out of the country. One could control dragons. I didn’t check on the other one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what did this.” 

He waved all around at that. Seto folded his arms across his chest and stared thoughtfully at everything around them. 

“How do we twist it back, then?” 

Mokuba considered that carefully before he answered. “I haven’t the faintest idea.” 

**To Be Continued**

**Notes:** A new chapter will be posted on Friday for the next two weeks. You people wanted to know what the Kaibas did, so now you're going to find out!


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Word Count:** 2,656|| **Story Word Count:** 5,302|| **Chapter Count:** 2/3

* * *

Mokuba wasn’t certain of how much time had passed. Anything even remotely electronic didn’t work in this place, no matter how much he tried to make it otherwise. There couldn’t have been a better method invented to stop him from doing anything at all and to annoy Seto to the ends of the earth and back again. 

He still kept on trying, though, struggling to remember everything he’d ever heard about dimensional twists and pocket universes. It wasn’t nearly enough. He sort of hoped that there were people in Domino who could fix this and were doing their best to do it, but neither he nor Seto were the type to just sit around and wait for someone else to take care of a problem. 

He wasn’t sure of what Seto was doing, but he trusted his brother to at least be thinking of potential escape plans. The way he sat with the Millennium Rod, his eyes closed, and as stiff as he could make himself, lent something to that theory. Mokuba had no idea of if the Rod could help at all, aside from being a fine way to skin the hide off the jerk who’d put them there. 

That did sound like a pretty good way to spend some time later, though. He’d have to remember to suggest it to Seto. 

After what had to be hours of prowling around looking for anything that could be useful, as well as scouring his brain for anything else at all, Mokuba had what he thought could be a small success. 

He stared at the two small gemstone shards wedged into the door frame that _should_ have led outside as if he were trying to determine their worth. He’d done that, actually, in the first few seconds. When it came to monetary value, he judged them probably not worth the trouble in the first place. He could tell magic had been embedded in them somehow, and they were probably connected to why they couldn't get out of here. 

Spying a small piece of wood from what had been his desk – that had been crushed quite thoroughly and he suspected those dragons the intruder had with him of doing it – he picked it up and prodded toward them. 

Toward them, not at them, because no sooner did the scrap of wood get within a finger’s width of them than he found himself hurled halfway across the room. 

He wasn’t knocked out, not this time, but it took another few minutes before he could see clearly and sit up again. Seto abandoned whatever he was doing with the Rod to hover over him until then. 

“I think I found something,” Mokuba murmured as soon as he could get the words put together in a coherent fashion. “I don’t know how to get through it, though.” Maybe if they had high explosives… 

Clearly Seto needed to give more thought to what he kept hidden in his office if they didn’t have any. 

Seto nodded, glancing over to the door, then looked back at him. “I’ve had a little luck. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Kisara.” 

That didn’t surprise Mokuba in the slightest. There were many dragons that owed their allegiance to Seto in one form or another, but Kisara was the most powerful of them all. No one knew exactly where her lair was, or that much about her. She did occasionally work with Isis and her band of super-heroines, but that was about it. Sometimes she worked with Seto, too. 

“Did you?” Mokuba started to hunt around for another bottle of water. They were going to miss dinner, and that would be very bad for a large number of reasons. Both of them had high energy needs, which meant lots of food at regular intervals. Going too long without would put them into far worse than a very bad mood. 

“Not exactly.” Seto frowned, staring down at the Rod. While it normally conferred only the power to control minds, it could also link minds together, especially between a dragon and their chosen dragon tamer. It came in handy on more than one occasion, when Seto’s own abilities weren’t quite up to the task. 

“What do you mean?” 

“There was some kind of a barrier, and not entirely like this.” Seto gestured to what surrounded them. “It was like I could almost hear her, and then someone drowned me out.” 

Mokuba stared down into his water bottle and decided that he very much disliked everything about this situation and everyone connected to it. Security was going to need an overhaul anyway, it seemed, if that guy got into KaibaCorp without being stopped or at least his little toys detected. 

“I think what I found wasn’t what’s keeping us in here,” Mokuba said after a very long stretch of silence. He didn’t have his usual confidence in his words but he tried anyway. “It’s not what’s twisting us into this space, anyway.” He hated not having the words for what he wanted to say. “I think it’s just kind of… the lock on the door. If it wasn’t there, we could probably find a way to break the seal and get ourselves out of here.” 

Seto nodded, eyes as thoughtful as Mokuba’s. “But that force field protects it. So if the field wasn’t there, we could destroy it, and get out.” 

“Right.” Something put them into this not-space. The shards _kept_ them there, locking the door. The force field prevented them from getting to the lock. Take out the force field and all the rest of it would go down. 

Which left the very large problem of how to get rid of the force field. 

Mokuba found what was left of the sofa, settled himself on it, and stared in irritation at the ceiling. He knew all the pieces but he didn’t know how to _undo_ them all. He wasn’t doing good enough. He wasn’t helping his brother the way that he needed and wanted to. 

He wanted to get angrier. But that wasn’t actually possible just then. 

_I’d probably blow up if that happened anyway._ If it got Seto out of there, he’d do it without a moment of hesitation. But since that wasn’t an option, he had to sit there and think harder about something that he could do. 

What made everything just a little worse wasn’t just that he couldn’t find the right thing to do. It was that Seto couldn’t either. He’d put his chair and desk back in order, as best that he could right now when they’d been half-destroyed, and sat there with the Rod in his hands, eyes closed, mind somewhere between this world and another, and not getting any closer to breaking through to Kisara than he had the first time. 

Mokuba knew exactly how frustrated he was. Even without power, there had been times when he’d been able to communicate with Noah, if no one else. Since the first time they’d met, there’d been a link between the two of them that flowed almost as strong as between himself and Seto. There had even been times… well, that wouldn’t do any good right now. 

But the point was that even without power, he’d been connected on some level. Now he wasn’t, and he couldn’t fully escape the worry that somehow or other, Noah wasn’t going to be there when they got back to their world. 

The very idea of that sent even _more_ chills through him, as if he didn’t possibly have enough from everything else. 

He lifted his head to stare at the offending gem shards and their nearly invisible force field. What they needed was _information_ of any kind on how to get rid of that thing, no matter how they got it. Books, the internet, someone who just knew about force fields and how to dispose of them, it didn’t matter. But here, sealed up in a room that seemed incredibly large when they could get outside and now vaguely reminded him of a cracker box, they had almost nothing. 

Just each other, their own wits and information, and their own talents. With almost nothing to connect them to the outer world in a way that could get them anything else that they needed. 

Mokuba liked a challenge, but he preferred one that they had some sort of chance of _winning_. 

_All right. We’re going to win this one even if we can’t_ They were Kaibas. Better than that, they were _each other_. The Kaiba money wasn’t going to help them out here. Only what they had would. 

He racked his brain all over again. There had to be something that would offer a little help, somewhere in the dark recesses where he’d forgotten more than he could imagine right now. 

His attention drifted over to Seto, who hadn’t moved from behind his chair for several minutes. That worried him more than he wanted to think about. How far was too far when it came to a dragon and their tamer and the bond between them. 

What about all the other dragons that Seto had linked to over the years? Could they tell that anything was wrong? Could they do anything about it? 

He circled about that thought for several minutes, trying to pin it down. Something felt very right about it and yet he still couldn’t put his finger on it. 

_What other dragons?_ He knew for a fact that Seto and Jounouchi hadn't ever properly bonded, though they’d skirted in that direction a little over the years. Jounouchi liked his freedom too much to try to make it official, though. 

They’d have to take care of that. Mokuba recalled a mention that a low-level dragon tamer had tried that on Jounouchi once before, some guy named Hirutani, but that had been a long time ago. It didn’t make a difference right now, either. Just a mental tick on the list. 

He ran over the list again. He knew that his abilities weren’t going to do a lot right now. Seto’s stood the best chance, if he’d made the right contacts. 

Wasn’t _that_ always how it was? 

He pushed that thought away. He could speculate later. They needed solid information now. 

One by one he ran over the list of dragons that he knew for a fact his brother had some sort of connection with. There had to be one that could help, or knew someone who could help. 

If there was, an intrusive thought wondered, would Seto be able to contact it from here? Would his abilities and the Millennium Rod reach so far? 

_We have to try._ It was the same mantra that had sustained them throughout their years with Gozaburo. If they didn’t try anything, they wouldn’t _get_ anything but what he wanted them to get. Neither of them would settle for that. 

Inch by inch Mokuba ran over the list until he wanted to scream. There was an answer, they both knew the answer, they just had to _find_ the answer. 

They were in a side dimension, a little pocket of reality. He started to mentally strike off all the dragons that he knew of who couldn’t do anything like that. 

That still left several. He struck off more: all the ones that he could think of who could do that and yet weren’t connected to Seto. There were still a few more left. 

He sat up. At the same moment Seto’s head came up, his grip on the Rod tightening, but his eyes wide with the same thought Mokuba had, Mokuba _knew_ it. 

They looked toward one another, two near-identical smiles of triumph. 

“ _Different Dimension Dragon_!” 

Mokuba was on his feet a heartbeat later, crossing over to where Seto sat. 

“Can you get in touch?” Neither Mokuba nor Seto could be absolutely certain that Seto’s current lack of success was because of where they were or something else altogether. 

“I’m going to find out.” 

Mokuba wasn’t surprised when Seto reached for a bottle of water of his own first. Contacting dragons wasn’t easy under normal circumstances, even for someone like his brother. They’d been here for _hours_ and Mokuba couldn’t wait to get himself wrapped around a good steak. He didn’t think Seto would be any different. At least they were hydrated. 

For now. 

Finally Seto settled back in his chair, resumed his grip on the Rod, and closed his eyes. Mokuba stayed standing by the chair, nervous, sweat of tension pooling in the small of his back. 

He didn’t know how much time passed. An infinity of it. No time and all time and every other kind of time. 

And then something _exploded_ in the center of the room and for the first few seconds, Mokuba saw a slim blue dragon there. Everything blurred – everything around the dragon – and when it cleared, a young man stood there, his hair the same blue as his dragon-skin. 

“I came as soon as I could, Kaiba-sama,” the human form of Different Dimension Dragon said. “We have to hurry.” 

Seto’s eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?” _What has that idiot done?_ was the question he didn’t say but it hung behind his words regardless. 

“It’s Kisara. She’s been attacking the city for the last couple of hours.” He shook his head. “Seeress and her team have been working on stopping her, but I don’t know if they can. I don’t think even they know if they can.” 

Seto nodded, sliding the Rod back into the sheath he carried it in when he needed to go somewhere with it. “I know what the problem is.” 

“Another problem is that time gets _twisted_ when you jump through dimensions like I do,” Different Dimension Dragon said, ducking his head. “We might get there… after everything.” 

Seto stood up. “We’ll deal with that when we get there. Ready, Mokuba?” 

“Thought you’d never ask.” Mokuba cast a quick glance at his laptop, then grabbed it. It might take more time than they had to get everything back in order, and it would go faster if he had something to work with, even something as battered and broken as this was. 

Besides, being back in the real world would mean he would be connected again, even if his personal laptop didn’t work. The joys of being a technopath. 

Different Dimension Dragon resumed his dragon form, Seto settled on his back, and Mokuba right behind him. The dragon threw his head back in a wild, proud cry, before he leaped to his feet, and crossed dimensional walls that neither Mokuba nor Seto could see. 

There wasn’t anything between dimensions. It was here, there, and nowhere, all at the same time. There were slight flickers that might’ve been something, but if they were, Mokuba didn’t know what they could be. Other travelers, perhaps? The Different Dimension family was a very big family, and were the ones who could and did cross dimensions the easiest. There were others as well, but Mokuba couldn’t recall them all now. 

Nor did it matter, when something _twisted_ elsewhere and then _untwisted_ and they hovered outside of the KaibaCorp building, quite a distance above the street. What first caught Mokuba’s eye was how the top floor wasn’t actually there: the part of the building where his brother’s office usually was. 

From the sharp intake of breath his brother drew, Seto had seen it too. 

“We’ll take care of that after we take care of _him_ ,” Seto decided. He tapped on Different Dimension Dragon’s shoulder. “Take us down to the ground.” 

Different Dimension Dragon nodded and began to circle downwards. Mokuba could see all the damage done as they descended, and a heartbeat later saw Kisara, in full dragon form, knocking down a building. 

Then, before he could comprehend anything else, _words_ slammed into his mind, sharp and worried and raging. 

**Mokuba! Mokuba, are you there? Are you there?**

**To Be Continued**

**Notes:** I had fun writing this. Still one chapter to go, for next week!


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Word Count:** 2,698|| **Story Word Count:** 8,000|| **Chapter Count:** 3/3

* * *

Mokuba tightened his grip on Seto, trying to focus himself so he could get through to Noah. _Noah. I’m here. Calm down._

His not-quite-brother didn’t seem to understand the concept of ‘calm down’ at that moment, as he kept babbling Mokuba’s name, and Mokuba suspected that if they’d both been physical, Noah would’ve been making it very difficult for him to breathe. 

As it was, _thinking_ was almost impossible when he was still trying to sort out his connection to the technological world and the internet itself, while Noah babbled incoherently and seemed to be trying to crowd inside the part of Mokuba’s mind that remained connected to him. 

_Noah!_ Mokuba did his level best to shout at him, and for a few seconds, Noah stopped his chatter and ‘looked’ at him. _I’m all right. We were just in a cut off dimension for a while. But we’re back now. What can you tell me?_

There was a sort of mental blink, then Noah resumed his usual refined, quiet attitude. If Mokuba hadn’t been a technopath himself, he might’ve even believed that his not-brother calmed down entirely. 

**That person who came to the office – I’ve found a lot of different names for him but I haven’t yet pinned down one that could be his real name – stole all of the records on dragons after he banished you and Seto. A couple of hours later, Kisara started to rampage through the city. I put in a call to Seeress and her people and I think they almost have it taken care of.**

Mokuba glanced to where he could see not just Kisara, but the forms of the heroines dealing with the problem. He wasn’t sure himself, but he trusted they would do their duty to the city. They always did. 

_Anything else?_

**He has a few other dragons with him, but none as big or dangerous as Kisara. Most of the problem is property damage and injuries.**

Mokuba ran through all of that. In a general sort of way, it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The hospitals would be crowded more so than usual for a while, but KaibaCorp had a division devoted to funding for that, keeping all kinds of personnel ready when events such as this turned up. There would be people and supplies ready to take care of the situation as soon as they could make it through to where they were needed. 

KaibaCorp might not be responsible for this, but Mokuba knew how his brother thought, and though they both knew that Kisara could not be doing this of her own free will, since she and Seto were dragon and dragon tamer, he considered it part of his responsibility to deal with the aftermath of it. 

Now for it to just _become_ aftermath. 

Some of the tension ran out of Seto just as they landed and dismounted Different Dimension Dragon. Mokuba looked up in time to see Kisara changing from her great dragon form, and a flicker of white hair showed as she entered the building she’d been standing in front of. 

“I think it’s over,” he murmured, checking on his phone as he spoke. He typed for a few moments and Mokuba could tell he was sending a text to someone: their driver. They would need to get to their secondary office in order to take care of matters from here. 

One of those matters would be the idiot who got all of this started in the first place. Mokuba had a few ideas on what he wanted to do with him, mostly involving hideous amounts of pain and probably having to live inside of a dimensional prison of his own for a few years. Fifty or sixty sounded good to him. 

**Not good enough,** Noah muttered, keeping up with his thoughts as he virtually always did. **I say leave him there until the great-grandchildren he’s never going to have are skeletons.**

Mokuba couldn’t deny that the idea had a lot of appeal to it. But he wanted to know what had happened with Kisara before he made up his mind on what he would suggest when Seto asked his opinion on the matter. 

**I already know and trust me, you’re going to want something even worse than that.**

The only reason Noah had any sympathy at all for Kisara was because Mokuba did, since he knew her via Seto. Noah didn’t have a lot of empathy for anyone who wasn’t Mokuba, and maybe the occasional other technopath. Mokuba didn’t expect otherwise. He knew his not-brother too well for that. Empathy was something that tended to require a physical body to have and Noah didn’t have one of those anymore. 

The limousine – one of their limousines – pulled up, and Seto and Mokuba settled in it once Seto dismissed Different Dimension Dragon. Seto seldom used his dragons for his personal transportation, unless he absolutely needed to blow someone’s mind – metaphorically, at least. 

Mokuba wouldn’t have been all that surprised if he’d descended to pass judgment on this fake tamer with every dragon that he knew in tow. The more he thought about that, the more he agreed with the concept. Noah rumbled in agreement in the back of his mind. 

It didn’t take long, even with the rubble in the streets, to get to their secondary headquarters. Not many people knew this was where KaibaCorp had an office, and every Kaiba preferred to keep it that way. Only certain people even had access there who weren’t Kaibas. 

Seto and Mokuba settled into the office, which was nearly an exact duplicate of the one currently inhabiting some other dimension, and waited. It didn’t take long at all for Seeress to show up, Kisara a few steps behind her. 

Seto rose at once, eyes on Kisara. “Are you all right?” 

Kisara kept her eyes down, her shoulders tight. She nodded, little more than a faint move of her head. Mokuba couldn’t read dragon body language like Seto could, but he knew Kisara, and he knew she was more or less lying through her teeth without saying a word. 

“Where is he? What exactly happened?” Seto demanded. 

“Black Magician Girl is keeping an eye on him,” Seeress said. Mokuba and Seto both knew their secret identities, but it was considered a breach of protocol to use their given names when they weren’t in uniform. Seeress’s didn’t look very different from her normal garb, save for the veil that she kept to hide her face. It wasn’t an ordinary veil, since no one else could take it off but her, and Mokuba suspected it had been enchanted so that no matter how much one knew her in her civilian identity, they wouldn't realize who they were looking at unless she allowed it. 

Seto nodded. “I want him brought here.” He didn’t ask. Kaibas normally didn’t ask. 

“I’ll let her know.” Seeress glanced toward Kisara, then back at Seto. “He had an amulet of some kind that he’d found in ruins. I can’t tell yet just where those ruins were. But it allowed him to control dragons.” 

One of Seto’s eyebrows crept up the tiniest fraction. “Had?” 

Kisara lifted her head, not much more than Seto’s eyebrow came up. “I destroyed it.” 

“Only dragon-fire could. And I didn’t think anyone else had a better right to doing it than she did.” 

Seto considered that before he gave an approving nod. “Was there any real reason behind it, or did he just think controlling dragons would be an interesting way to pass his afternoon?” 

“He wanted to be a dragon tamer, but he wasn’t born with the ability,” Seeress said. “And he genuinely seems to think that dragons are lesser creatures that should be controlled.” 

Dragon masters didn’t control dragons. They befriended them. They worked with them. They understood them. No true dragon master would ever want to use a dragon to hurt someone who hadn’t earned it. 

With every word Seeress said, Mokuba added another five years to the punishment the would-be tamer was racking up. If this kept up, solitary confinement until the day he died would be the best option the guy could hope for. 

“How many dragons did he have control of?” Seto asked. Seeress gave a number; it wasn’t in the nature of an army, but with Kisara under his power, he hadn’t needed an army. If they hadn’t been able to get to him and take that amulet back, they probably would’ve returned to the entire city on fire, not just a few places. 

“Make sure they’re recovered and taken care of. I’ll talk to them as soon as I’ve finished with him.” 

Mokuba could see Seto’s eyes from where he sat, and he wasn’t surprised in the slightest to see them slit for a few second: the eyes of a dragon. The mark of a true dragon tamer, to share the eyes of one’s companions. 

While arrangements were made for further repairs and medical options, Mokuba got down to business getting his laptop replaced, and trying to convince Noah that now really wasn’t a good time to try to work out a way to give him a physical body again. 

Not that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, but it would have to be something like an android or a robot, so they could download Noah's mind into it. It was a project that he and Seto had bounced between the two of them for some time now. It wasn’t at a point where they could actually do it, but they both sketched thoughts for the idea when they had nothing else to do with their time. 

Noah wanted it. Noah wanted it very badly. And Mokuba had a pretty good idea that it would happen one day. But _now_ wasn’t even close to the right time to start figuring out how to put it all together and retain everything that made Noah who and what he was. That would be the most difficult part, to keep Noah as himself, instead of a slightly smarter robot. 

Mokuba being a technopath could probably help with that. But it still remained in the future for them all to deal with. 

**Noah. Relax.** He knew why it was suddenly so important to Noah. If he had a way to interact with the physical world, he wouldn't have been so absolutely terrified when Mokuba and Seto vanished. 

And on that note, Mokuba put in an order for one of their mage-equipped clean-up crews to hit up the KaibaCorp main building and clear up all of that mess with the office being partially twisted out of their dimension. They’d need to get it sorted out before complete operations could resume. 

With that taken care of, and Noah starting to calm himself down just a little more, Mokuba stood up in time with his brother. 

“Judgment hall?” Mokuba asked. Seto nodded, that hint of dragon’s eyes gleaming once again. Mokuba wouldn’t have been surprised at all to find that Seto had a dragon’s teeth as well. 

Not that he’d need them to rend today’s target into quivering chunks, verbally or otherwise. 

Together, the two of them headed back out to where the limousine awaited them, this time taking them to where Seto pronounced judgment on all of those who harmed dragons, or in rare cases, dragons who harmed others willingly. 

Mokuba mentally rubbed his hands together. He loved seeing his big brother acting as the premier dragon tamer in all of the world. 

_Noah, do we have it set up to upload the video in real-time? And the social media?_

**I’ve already got it taken care of.** His not-brother verbally preened, switching from worry over his own future to taking care of the interesting parts of running the KaibaCorp mainframe in the space of a heartbeat. **There are people waiting to watch the stream already.**

He paused for a moment before he chuckled. **One of them is Jounouchi.**

Mokuba snorted at that. One day Jounouchi and Seto would work things out to whatever degree they could. That day just wasn’t going to be today. 

Only Seto and Mokuba occupied the room at first. Then one by one the dragons began to filter in. They all wore their human forms, with their eyes only marking them for what they were. They settled in quietly, Kisara among them, accompanied by Seeress, the only human there, until Black Magician Girl and the rest of their team entered. 

And with them came the wanna-be tamer, softly glowing manacles on his wrists, and a furious look in his eyes as he glared all around. The moment he caught sight of Seto, he exploded in furious snarls that just happened to make words. 

“What are you doing here? This is all your fault! If you’d just given me what I wanted in the first place, none of this would’ve happened! What gives you the right to pass judgment on me!” 

Seto cast a glance at Black Magician Girl. “Shut him up.” 

“I thought you’d never ask!” Black Magician Girl chirped before waving her wand. A band of energy now appeared over his mouth, keeping him absolutely silent. He still struggled, he still glared, but nothing more came out of his mouth. Mokuba definitely counted that as an improvement. 

Seto stared down at him. “Since you asked, what gives me the right to pass judgment is that you used dragons - _my_ dragons – to commit your crimes, and you committed your crimes _against_ dragons, which puts you absolutely under my authority. I have every right and _duty_ to ask any of them – especially Kisara – to roast you where you stand. Or to eat you, if I thought you wouldn’t poison them.” 

The wanna-be paled and started to shake his head. Seto ignored him, calling instead for a reading of all the damage, emotional and physical, that had been done during the assault. The amount turned out a little more than Mokuba originally thought, but the exact details didn’t make a big difference. What mattered was Seto’s judgment. 

“Because you have the extremely mistaken idea that dragons are _servants_ or _slaves_ , I have decided upon a punishment that will teach you a lesson: you will be collared to prevent you from speaking or from disobeying a reasonable command given to you by any of my dragons. And they will be able to use you to do anything they want that is reasonable. I will give them a list of commands I already consider reasonable and anything that’s not on the list will be passed through me first. You won’t be killed or put into any situation where you can kill yourself if you’re in that frame of mind.” 

Seto met the would-be tamer’s eyes, his own bright and flashing and full of a deep rage. “This will be your fate until you can actually prove to me and everyone - _everyone_ \- harmed by your ignorance that you regret your actions.” A slash of a dark smile brushed by his lips. “Though I’m certain you’ll regret your _punishment_ in no time at all.” 

He rose to his feet, gesturing for Black Magician Girl to manage the collar. The dragons would take care of him after that. 

Mokuba couldn’t imagine a better punishment. Though he still kind of leaned toward the idea of trapping him in a dimensional prison too. If he didn’t learn his lesson with the dragons, then maybe… 

**Are you done? Can you come see me now?** Noah wanted to know. Mokuba let the last of the daily strain slip away, fully aware that the day was over with. He’d done everything that he could and anything else that turned up wouldn’t really need his attention until tomorrow, at the earliest. 

_I think so._ It would definitely be a relaxing way to spend the evening. He caught Seto’s eye and glanced toward the laptop briefly. Seto nodded; he understood what Mokuba wanted. He would have his own way to relax after all of this. 

And they would need all the rest they could get, to be ready for whatever the next day would bring. 

**The End**

**Notes:** And that's it!


End file.
